Strife: Veteran Edition

Strife: Veteran Edition, also known as The Original Strife: Veteran Edition, is a re-release of Strife which was released through Steam on December 12, 2014 and GOG.com on. A version for the Nintendo Switch was released on, coinciding with a major update for the PC versions. It features an enhanced engine derived from Chocolate Strife but with many additional optional features, including an renderer with support for high-resolution, widescreen display, bloom, static lightmaps, dynamic light sources, and more. Some features that were planned but were not completed in time for the original release in 1996 have been fully implemented, including a multiplayer "Capture the Chalice" game mode derived from Capture the Flag, dynamic objective markers on the automap, a special HUD display for the mauler's torpedo mode, and so on.

The Veteran Edition also includes new content to highlight these additional features, however the original data files (STRIFE1.WAD and VOICES.WAD) have been left unchanged from the original 1.31 release. Instead a new data file, SVE.wad, contains modified and supplemental content.

Development
Stephen Kick was approached mid-summer 2014 by former employees of Rogue Entertainment who retained partial legal rights to Strife, after the latter were approached by several community members with questions about the game's legal status. After resolving the various issues left by the dissolving of the involved companies, Stephen set out to produce a new professional-quality release of the game, updated for needs of the modern market.

After initially approaching Simon Howard (Fraggle) to see if he would be interested in developing a custom version of the game, he was referred to James Haley (Quasar) and Samuel Villarreal (Kaiser), developers of the Chocolate Strife source port. He then commissioned a custom version of the game based on a specification devised by the two programmers and set an optimistic release date of October 2014. This was later pushed up to December due to delays and increasing scope of development.

Sven Ruthner (ptoing) was brought on as an artist to create new assets needed for the user interface, to fill in for deficiencies in widescreen support, and to touch up existing art where needed. Though it was an initial goal to have high resolution sprites and textures, this proved impossible to accomplish on the restricted budget and timeline of the project.

Due to then-ongoing recovery efforts with regard to the lost Strife source code, basing the product on an existing code base was a necessity. Due to the timely completion of Chocolate Strife in 2013, Chocolate Doom was chosen as an ideal basis. This necessitated that the project be, with the code released under the. A linking exception for the Steamworks API was provided by Simon Howard with the justification that it constitutes a system component due to ubiquitous distribution and the existence of.

Kaiser's primary focus was on the graphics engine, which is largely based on KEX 2, an evolution of the Doom64 EX code base. Quasar's primary focus was on removal of limits, stability of the game engine and fixing bugs in the original game (many conditionally, under the game's "classic mode" feature), and addition of new features such as Capture the Chalice.

The 2020 Nintendo Switch version was developed chiefly by Edward Richardson (Edward850) and Dimitris Giannakis (ModernVintageGamer), with initial portability work by Quasar and Max Waine (Altazimuth).

Levels
Strife: Veteran Edition includes a total of four new maps, one single-player "super secret" level, and three levels dedicated to Capture the Chalice game play.
 * MAP35: Factory: Production
 * MAP36: Castle Clash
 * MAP37: Killing Grounds
 * MAP38: Ordered Chaos

Talismans
Veteran Edition features an added quest to obtain three ancient relics called talismans, which are spread out through the game world. Obtaining the last talisman requires visiting the new secret level, a task which itself requires a new side quest added to flesh out the final hub of the game with more interactive characters. Completing this quest earns the player a super strength upgrade, which causes the punch dagger to be capable of destroying inquisitors in a single blow.

Source port support
Strife: Veteran Edition includes the original and  files, allowing existing source ports to play the original game. Chocolate Strife and ZDoom, as well as downstream forks of each, support finding and loading the game files automatically on Windows with Steam and GOG.com installs, removing any need to manually copy the files.

On Wednesday, May 31, 2017, GZDoom 3.1.0 was released, now supporting Strife Veteran Edition's extended single player campaign. As of June 4, 2017 (the time of this writing), Capture the Chalice, the multiplayer mode, is not yet supported.

Trivia

 * The trademark on "Strife" was allowed to lapse following the demise of Rogue Entertainment and Velocity Incorporated. In 2013, registered the trademark for a completely different game in the  genre. This new and unrelated Strife game explains the addition of "The Original" prefix in promotional materials for this re-release. After S2 Games was disbanded in 2018, the trademark again lapsed and was acquired by Nightdive Studios.
 * Various library functions and utilities, in addition to a native heap implementation, are borrowed from the last C-language version of the Eternity Engine.